My mother had draped herself in jewelry bought with stolen money and walked into the room to squeeze my shoulder, because in her mind the war was already over and won, the papers already signed, the soldier already too late and too simple to do anything but accept it.

Their openness was not innocence.

It was contempt — the specific contempt of people who have decided you are beaten before you know you’re in a fight.

And I stood there in my own foyer reading the watch and the pearls and my wife’s lowered eyes, and I let my face stay easy and glad, and I thought: they are wearing the evidence.

They are so sure of me that they are wearing it to my face. I would remember that later, when I needed to be certain I was doing the right thing.

They had shown me exactly who they were in the first ninety seconds.